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In the beginning, man created the telegraph, enabling communication of words or ideas from one place to another via smoke signals, then semaphores, and finally electric pulses. Then came wired and wireless audio (that’s Latin for “I hear”), followed closely by video (dead-speak for “I see”). Are you ready for what’s next? It’s called pario, the pertinent translation of which is “I create.” In the bright, bold future envisioned by research scientists at Carnegie Melon University and Intel, it represents the ability to transmit and project real-time moving three-dimensional facsimiles of objects or people without the need for any dorky glasses or hologram projectors. Indeed, if Princess Leia had broadcast her plea for help in pario, Obi-Wan, C-3PO, and Luke could’ve stroked her Cinnabons.

This is a big step beyond the limitations of virtual reality, with its gloves, goggles and flat-screen projections. It’s synthetic reality. Living trompe l’oeil, made possible by smart matter, for which we have yet another new word to add to your lexicon: claytronics. Electronic clay that can sculpt itself because it’s made up of tiny autonomous robots called (here’s another one) catoms. These microdroids contain a CPU, an energy store, a network device, a video output to project a color on the outer surface, one or more sensors, a means of locomotion, and a mechanism for adhering to other catoms.

The initial proof-of-concept catoms are cat’s-eye marble size, they use magnets to move and connect, their mass constrains them to two-dimensional formations, and they’re hugely expensive. The next generation will be BB-size with no moving parts. They’ll weigh considerably less than a gram and use electrostatics to maneuver into position, producing low-definition 3D pario at a price still be too steep for widespread use. The chemically manufactured aerosol-size nano-catoms will produce hi-def realism at a cost of millicents per catom. Instead of using batteries or capacitors, these micro- and nano-catoms may derive photovoltaic power from light, or a magnetic resonance field could energize them the way non-contact inductive battery chargers work. The smaller catoms will require power only to move into position. Once in place, they’ll hang onto each other using nanofiber adhesives, molecular surface adhesion, or possibly covalent chemical bonding for greatest strength (breaking these bonds is energy intense, however). Individual catoms won’t be addressed directly by the controller as there may be millions of them in a formation. Instead they’ll each communicate with their immediate neighbors and be addressable as a collective, like ants on a mission.

How will the car-biz benefit? Imagine simultaneous styling reviews of a new car design on three continents with all participants seeing, touching, and modifying the same model, or instantly sampling the ergonomics of many competing dashboard themes without leaving your seat. There will be a limit to the amount of force claytronic formations (usually hollow) can withstand. They’ll feel like Styrofoam at first, increasing to credit-card plastic strength and a bit beyond eventually, so an aero wing made entirely of claytronics is unlikely, but perhaps catoms could alter the surface shape of a structural wing on the fly. Radio antennas that change their shape, length, or orientation to best suit the tuned frequency are being considered. Claytronics might make intricate casting molds possible once the catoms reach sand-grain proportions. Future service-bay technicians might dispatch micro-robotic mechanics into an engine to diagnose problems or possibly affect minor repairs, preventing costly engine teardowns — the medical community likes this idea.

The possibilities truly seem endless in this electromechanical garden of Eden — and it has nothing to do with Apple.

This technology so gripped my imagination that I had many questions and much more to say than will fit on a single magazine page. Below are rough transcripts of my interviews with three of the architects of pario, claytronics, synthetic reality, and the rest of it. They are Seth Copen Goldstein, associate professor of Computer Science and Todd C. Mowry, professor of Computer Science, both at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburg, and Jason Campbell, senior staff research scientist at Intel Corporation’s Pittsburg lab.

MT: I’m blown away by the whole notion of pario and claytronics. I am aware these technologies as envisioned on that CNN video are way out in the future, but since you showed a car in that, it certainly suggests there are automotive aspects of the technology. Let’s start out with some basic questions that occur to me.

What powers these claytronic catoms-stored energy, inductive field energy, or conducted energy?

Seth Copen Goldstein: Powering is a major challenge. We want them to do a lot of stuff, and there’s no room for batteries and supercapacitors don’t have enough energy storage. So we need to harvest energy from external world. Magnetic resonant coupling is one approach. You have a large external coil and little coils in each catom. A resonance is established between the catoms and the big coil. Such inductive coupling is now about 55-70% efficient. The key challenge here is that when you have lots of units within the same coil they can interact with each other presenting a “distributed control” problem. Photovoltaic energy is another possibility. Using semi transparent catoms, we could power a layer five-catoms deep and then transfer energy to the deeper ones, probably by capacitive coupling. Very small pario objects, might be fairly solid [deep catoms]. Same capacitive couplings. Larger objects need to be hollow for many reasons.

MT: It seems like communication between the host computer and these catoms must be radically different than what we know of today, as there’s no way to address each catom individually when there are millions of them, right?

SCG: We are looking at a couple things here. Physical channel, capacitive couplings could allow communication with each catom’s nearest neighbors. None will have unique IP addresses, but all will be content addressable, using function-based addressing. Say you’re building a car object. The wheel catoms will all lumped together. Most algorithms only require local nearest-neighbor communications. Each group talks about its own neighborhood. When everyone is talking about their neighborhood, you get a global result. Collecting local information and talking to nearest neighbors is enough to get the global result you need. Imagine ants going from the nest to get food. If somebody blocks the path of the ants, they don’t get lost, they figure out how to get back home. We need to set up a network inside the ensemble. Scale is a huge part of this. Unlike when sending messages on the internet, we don’t need to talk to the individuals, need to talk to general parts about their physical position. We’re working on a way to build the equivalent of info super-highways inside, by designating certain links to be high-speed, to deliver information, for example, on balance-where’s the instantaneous center of gravity of the object now?

MT: I recently toured the Star Trek exhibit now showing at the Detroit Science Center, and one display pertinent to this discussion referred to the Holodeck. They basically said that the technology exists to make such a simulated environment possible but the computing power and energy required to pull it off was enormous. Pario/claytronics are sort of a Holodeck proposition, so what breakthroughs need to happen or have happened to make this more possible than Gene Rodenbury thinks?

Todd C. Mowry: The Holodeck is problematic, because the depth always seemed infinitely variable, but let’s just say you want to simulate objects and people joining you within the physical space of the “Holodeck” room. The main challenge is not necessarily energy or computation, so long as everything isn’t moving all the time. You can manage flow of energy economically. But you would be talking about millions or billions of catoms required to make a room full of furniture and life-size friends from around the world joining you. Imagine a room filled with a couple hundred DVD players. The cost of each is now quite a bit lower, but the room is still going to be expensive. Eventually catoms will cost in the Millicent range each, but you still need millions of them, so the idea may never be cheap.

I’ve read about some potential applications for pario that seem well beyond what your video proposed, and some of them seem downright unrealistic to me. One is the notion that these catoms could form a seatbelt when needed in a wreck. There has to be a practical limit to the forces these catoms can withstand and exert, right?

SCG: Picture three different time frames. In the near term, say five years, we’re mostly aiming for strong enough adhesion to maintain shape, exert minor force like flimsy plastic. From there, not much technology is needed to achieve credit-card strength, at which point a chair you could sit on may become possible using adhesion based on artificial gecko-foot material [bio-mimetic Van der Waal’s effect adhesion]. Achieving anything approaching the strength needed for a seatbelt would require programmable covalent (chemical) bonds, and the hard part of that is making them reversible enough to reconfigure. You might only be able to make and break such a bond 10 times or less. Not necessarily impossible. We have the energy in the catoms, can use that energy to make the bonds, if can recover energy when breaking those bonds, could work. Mechanical linkages where they hook together to form a mechanical connection may also be possible.

MT: It’s been proposed that a synthetic facsimile of a doctor rendered in pario could appear in a room, touch a patient (take pulse, ask if this or that feels tender), with sensors reporting back to the real doc somewhere else. Is this plausible?

TCM: Yes

MT: Is that guy a giant shell of catoms?

TCM: Yes

MT: What happens if the patient takes a punch at him?

TCM: Safety systems would prevent the real punch from being transmitted to the real doctor, and the synthetic doc would like a pillow on patient’s end.

MT: How hard could someone shake his hand without crumpling it?

TCM: Normal.

MT: Could this virtual doctor lift anything substantial?

SCG: That’s pretty hard to do, because the synthetic doctor won’t weigh much, so he can’t balance much of a load.

MT: Okay, let’s talk about some automotive applications. Obviously your video tape as shown on CNN shows what looks like a global car company doing a multi-continent review of a claytronic model, with designers and engineers able to mold and stretch the proportions, so that’s one. Ergonomic customer evaluation of various dash layouts seems like another obvious one. What about in manufacturing? Might catoms assume the shape of a complex mold casting long enough for some material to flow around them and harden, then they retreat in ways sand never could, so that a mold material could flow into the space they formerly occupied?

SCG: When catoms reach sand-grain size that might work. They’ll be a mm or so to begin with, which probably wouldn’t work too well.

TCM: Imagine 3D faxing. Say you’re an archaeologist in the field and you don’t want to carry a 3D scanner or printer. You can just wrap the bone or whatever you’re interested in with a layer of these catoms, then let the computer calculate the shape of the thing it’s surrounding for replication at a pario “printer” elsewhere.

MT: Might this technology allow doctors (or mechanics) to pretend to be miniaturized down sufficiently to investigate and repair hardened arteries or clogged engine valves without major surgery/disassembly?

SCG: There is work ongoing to make a smart pill for gastrointestinal exploration, allowing untethered access to highly remote places, using the ability to change shapes and get into small spaces. There could be problems powering the catoms inside a metal engine, however. Though I suppose you could tether the microbot with a power/communication cable.

In the near term everything will be smaller than breadbox. That’s the size scale, so object weigh and, the location of its center of gravity won’t present a problem.

Antennas that change their properties by changing shape are another potential automotive application. Particle antenna performance can be very close to that of a metal antenna, as long as the particles are way smaller than the wavelength you’re tuning in.

Another interesting field application: The military has some materials that can be liquefied and resolidified, but can’t shape themselves. Catoms might be able to make that happen by forming a mold shape.

MT: How did this research collaboration start between Intel and Carnegie Melon University?

Jason Campbell: Our lab is sited at CMU and exists to do open collaborations with CMU and the University of Pittsburg. Todd Mowry served as a visiting director here for three years on leave of absence from CMU. Todd arrived with a strong interest in claytronics, but hadn’t made much progress. I was a strong skeptic at first, but decided it wasn’t as farfetched as I’d originally thought, and that it was a logical next step in a bunch of today’s technologies. CMOS [complementary metal-oxide semiconductors] and MEMS [micro-electromechanical systems] advances are leading the way to claytronics. We may as well be working on the key software and hardware variables to make this happen now. I believe programmable morphology technology could be as big a shift as the one away from computing via punchcards.

MT: Is Intel sharing patents with CMU?

JC: Yes, we have a broad, open collaborative research agreement that generally shares patents. Our main aim is to advance science and publish results, but we’ll patent where practical, with both entities sharing. It’s always risky to be too greedy on patents. You have to know where to protect, versus where to invite broader collaboration.

MT: Does Intel envision producing the catoms, the control systems, both?

JC: That’s a business question. The technology is not that far from what Intel produces today. Who knows whether it will be the right thing from a business strategy standpoint. This is scientific research for now, not product research.

MT: But I’ll bet the product guys stick their heads into your lab pretty often, can you talk about any other commercial uses you have envisioned in the automotive or manufacturing realms?

JC: My favorite application is shape shifting mobile devices. Consider the many uses of today’s cell phones: talking versus writing email, versus watching movies, versus carrying in a pocket. What if its shape were reconfigurable to better suit the task? The radio, battery, and chip have to stay the same size and shape, but what if the rest of the case, keyboard, etc. could change. When not in use, maybe it gets as small and dense as possible. Then maybe you configure it as an armband or headset when exercising; make it long enough to stretch from ear to mouth when using as a telephone, make it wide enough for a comfortable keyboard when typing, make as big a screen as possible when watching video content, etc.

With the catom size between 0.1 and 1mm across you have roughly the same resolution as standard-definition pixels, and catom size will come down over time.

Then we have to look at the physical strength of these materials. Is it as strong as Styrofoam? Engineering plastic? The former may work for a phone. The latter could do provide revisable aerodynamic surfaces on a car. Need to build power and communication into each, so claytronics may never reach aluminum or certainly titanium strength.

We’re probably three to five years off from having research properties capable of demonstrating some of these uses. Then we can start thinking about the road to production. Clearly it will apply to very expensive products first, then costs will come down as volume ramps up.